NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE VII | PART I

QUEER AS YOU ARE

“The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” —William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch.”

Nowhere in Nepal, July 2025

Last evening, during the first night in Life without Ozzy in it, you were watching Queer, the portrait of the loveless life of William Burroughs —based on the namesake book of the intoxicating writer.

It is the best-directed film you can remember since Portrait of a Lady on Fire; the finest adaptation of a book since The Clockwork Orange; and nothing compared to any of the previous, mostly stunning scores by Trent Reznor.

The direction, acting, and soundtrack confabulate in unfathomable ways to scope and portray in slow motion the cardiac arrest of melancholy —not a small feat, it could have gone terribly wrong.

And it also impossibly, inconceivably and greatly features Daniel Craig as the utmost unlikely antihero he will ever play, and it makes the antihero greater than the merchandise and the product.

THE ART OF POISONING

Guadagnino sells you his product and the product is the deadliest poison ever filmed in the name of a writer, intoxicated or not, which not only improves the consumer experience but also turns Burroughs and Daniel Craig into two of the most iconic defeated and dignified stars to ever shine in the moonless night of Loveless Cinema.

By the end of the movie you are crying like a haemophilic trying to turn his tears into blood-clotting proteins. You see everything escaping you, including your soul, and you somehow sleep in a pool of released fears.

Now Here, Mexico 1951

“Shoot the bitch, then write a book. That’s what I did.”

William Burroughs, fucked and self-loathed

Bill Burroughs only started writing after killing Joan Volmer, his wife and posthumous muse.

He shot her in the head with a handgun while playing William Tell off his face —in front of seven witnesses.

Before starting writing, Bill had to hire a lawyer. It was not cheap, but he didn’t pay for it: his father did. Daddy was very rich, anything but sweet, and he intervened for one last time to sort his son out by providing him with an undefeated attorney.

The lawyer was known as Moby Dick. Joan had met him once, when he got her out of jail. “He was huge and he was a dick,” she said afterwards.

Joan was the funniest member of the bunch, a dysfunctional family of extremely talented drug addicts, who also loved music and literature. She took care of the making and adjusting of three of them, the most successful intoxicated writers to ever survive a generation. According to the obscure Finnish scholar, “Joan was the first AI in modern literature.”

THE THREE WITNESSES

Before her announced and devastating departure, Joan cursed three of the seven witnesses. She had been providing them with memorable and irrefutable lines like the dream of an AI. She had abused and loved them all, and overall she had been slagging their egos and opening their wildest doors of perception:

“If you outlive me, and chances are that you will, the three of you will stop procrastinating and will be sentenced to write.”

ANTI ERASERHEAD

After witnessing the explosion of Joan’s head, two of them got on with it, and only one, her husband, needed a lawyer before doing so.

The second, Allen Ginsberg, also turned Joan into his posthumous siren to howling acclaim, and forever tried to fuck the other two to no avail.

The third, Jack Kerouac, had already been published, although no one had read him.

In a matter of six years the three of them were catapulted to fame. They became the Infamous Beat writers, the Wildest Trinity of a movement that might never have existed without Joan’s fucked up existence and abhorrent death.

They were young romantics and they thought they were immortal until Bill shot Joan on the saddest September evening of their lives.

Now Here: Life Without Ozzy. Nepal, July, 2025.

Coming morning you open your eyes and feel the quality of the Queer product all over your faintly dried lachrymal, softened muscles and unapologetic smile, which is also a wail of released fear.

It feels like waking up to Melancholy’s wake, except you are waking up to Ozzy’s wake, hence you can’t stop writing WAKE WAKE WAKE

Until you AWAKE. OH MY OZZY!

THE EQUATION

You had it almost figured out by the end of the night, and you know that there is something in it, but you don’t have a clue yet of what it is.

There is definitely something in the equation that joins a murderous writer, a former James Bond, the Nine Inch Nails leader and the Black Sabbath Wild Goat, and you are on it while cycling to work, which is a ride that Heidi would fancy, displaying the Himalayas instead of the Alps; the water-buffalo instead of the cows, and the Nepali people instead of the Swiss people, a country you won’t ever be able to convey or conceal with the brilliance of Jean Beagin, the author of the hilarious and devastating novel you are currently reading,

“Greta called her Big Swiss because she was tall and from Switzerland, and often dressed from top to toe in white, the color of surrender. Her blond hair was as fine as dandelion dander and looked like it might fly off her head in a stiff breeze. She had a gap between her two front teeth, but none of the easy charm that usually came with it, and her pale blue eyes were of the penetrating, cult-leader variety. She turned heads wherever she went, including the heads of infants and dogs. Her beauty was like Switzerland itself—stunning, but sterile—and her Teutonic stoicism made the people around her seem like emotional libertines or, to use a more psychiatric term, total fucking basket cases.”

Jen Beagin. “Big Swiss.”

MORE ASHES TO ASH

And you cannot possibly stop thinking about how much Ash would have loved this film, therefore you start crying on the bicycle, under Sarangkot hill, some pornographic view of the snowed dragon and its untouched dentition.

And then a minivan appears before a deadly turn and you pull your breaks and skid sideways and a water-buffalo takes the hit instead of you and the guy with the traditional Nepalese hat comes to the rescue, deals with the shocked driver full of “Sorrys” and embarrassed smiles, the buffalo lying down the slope crying much quieter than the driver, who clearly wasn’t expecting such a morning.

You exchange endless Namastes with the driver and the first rescuer, and the driver eventually walks away and the rescuer stays, until the alignment is perfect.

The rescuers joins his hands, bows, says Namaste, lowers his neck, removes his cap and says:

“This is for Ozzy Osbourne, I’m sure you loved him.”

There is a bunch of dry mushrooms in the palm of his hand and you look at his ancient features and lovely smile, and you are so moved and so polite that you bring the mushrooms to your mouth just out of respect, even though you haven’t spent enough time in the country to crack the many bombed layers of etiquette, a book of rules that when apply to a foreigner can either result in something as toxic as the alleged nickname of the country “Never End Peace and Love, and as intoxicating as to put Gudagnino, Burroughs, Reznor and Craig together.

*Note that toxic is bad and intoxicating is good.

(TBC next week)